Animals in the News

The world's newest snake has menacing-looking yellow and black scales, dull green eyes and two spiky horns. And it's named after a 7-year-old girl.

Matilda's Horned Viper was discovered in a small patch of southwest Tanzania about two years ago and was introduced last month as the world's newest known snake species in an issue of Zootaxa.

Tim Davenport, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Tanzania, was on the three-person team that discovered the viper.

The Great Barrier Reef, like most other coral reefs around the world's oceans, is under threat from a number of sources, from the steadily acidifying waters of the sea to the impact of commercial fishing. But a new effort to collect samples from the reef has established the first frozen repository of Great Barrier Reef corals that could one day be used to restore coral populations.

Coral reefs are dynamic ecosystems made up of coral polyps, the hard skeletons they live in, the symbiotic algae that feed them and the myriad fish and other plants and animals that support and are supported by the corals.

Corals are under severe pressure because of to pollution from industrial waste, sewage, chemicals, oil spills, fertilizer, runoff and sedimentation from land; climate change;

It is a rare, little-known conservation success story. Asian lions have shot up in numbers from a low 50 or fewer in the early 1900s to more than 400 today. For the last few decades, the 1,400 sq km Gir forest was known as the last refuge of a species that once ranged across north India, from the Punjab in the north, to Jharkhand in the east, to the Narmada river in the south, and as far west as northern Morocco and Greece. In India, lions were decimated by hunters. Their frequent roars gave away their location, the plains they inhabited provided convenient access, their social habits made bagging several at a time the norm, and firearms made it all easy.

In 1973, the Gir Lion Project relocated almost 600 resident Maldhari families and their livestock and banished hundreds of thousands of cattle that seasonally grazed in Gir. Easing the pressure from

The humble camera trap — an automated digital device that takes a flash photo whenever an animal triggers an infrared sensor — has been coming into its own, playing an increasingly important role in wildlife conservation.

In recent years, the use of camera traps has led to major discoveries, including documenting an Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) in China for the first time in 62 years; proving that the world's rarest rhino, the Javan (Rhinoceros sondaicus), is breeding, by photographing a female with her calf; rediscovering the hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) in the Malaysian state of Sabah; recording the first wolverine (Gulo gulo) in California since 1922; taking the first video of the rare

Hundreds of thousands of people tromp through Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area near Las Vegas each year. How did they miss the dinosaur tracks?

Federal paleontologists announced this week the discovery of Nevada’s first formally documented set of dinosaur tracks, which were recently found by some volunteers in the conservation area’s fire-colored Aztec sandstone.

The dozens of prints likely belong to two-footed, three-toed carnivorous dinosaurs that were maybe 3 feet long, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. They are roughly 190 million years old, a near-incomprehensible age in a city where decades-old casinos are treated as relics.

“For those tracks to lie buried for tens of millions years and then be lifted and exposed by erosion at

This week, the Hula painted frog (Discoglossus nigriventer) — one of our “Ten Most Wanted Amphibians” during last year’s Search for Lost Frogs — was rediscovered in Israel.
 
Israel’s Lake Hula is one of the oldest documented lakes, providing fertile hunting and fishing grounds for humans for tens of thousands of years. But in the early 1950s, the lake and surrounding marshes were drained.

Though initially celebrated as a great national achievement for tackling malaria, in time it became increasingly evident that the benefits of draining the swamps were limited, but the costs were high. Exposed soil blew away and dried peat ignited, causing underground fires that proved hard to control. A nearby lake became polluted with chemical fertilizers, raising water quality concerns. The draining also led to the near extinction of an entire ecosystem and the unique endemic fauna of the lake, including the Hula painted frog. Ironically, species such as the painted frog feed on mosquitoes that carry malaria.

Concern over the draining of Hula grew among the people of Israel, leading to the formation of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and a movement for the reflooding of the Hula Valley. It took 40 years for the protesters’ voices to be heard, but in the mid 1990s, parts of the Hula Valley were reflooded.

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Among the legion of challenges facing conservationists in Africa, few have greater existential consequences than the one faced by those working to save our closest evolutionary relatives – chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas – from extinction.

For chimpanzees, the prognosis is dire. Over the past century, wild numbers have declined by an astonishing 90 per cent. Today there may be as few as 172,000 individuals remaining, and fully 80 per cent of these are found in just a handful of African countries: Guinea, Cameroon, Gabon, here in fragile

“Most experts now acknowledge that the bush-meat trade has eclipsed habitat loss as the biggest threat to great ape populations in Africa,” says Jane Lawton, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada.

In June of 2009, wildlife officials in this small central African country confiscated a baby chimpanzee from his human keeper. The one-year old ape was emaciated and extremely malnourished, unable to drink water without vomiting, infested with lice and suffering from a candida infection so severe that his digestive system was on the verge of shutting down.

Chimpanzees live 50 to 60 years in captivity, so those who are retired have long histories, although the details can be spotty.

Patin, Emslee and Arielle

At the New Iberia Research Center, three chimps about a year old, named Patin, Emslee and Arielle, are probably the last chimps that will be born there, according to M. Babette Fontenot, the director of behavioral sciences. The babies, which have been raised in a nursery because they were rejected by their mothers, were bred for use in biomedical research. Thomas Rowell, the director of the research center, said that the National Institutes of Health had signaled that it would not need young chimpanzees, so the center was doing vasectomies on male chimps.

Chimps’ similarity to humans makes them valuable for research, and at the same time inspires intense sympathy. To research scientists, they may look like the best chance to cure terrible diseases. But to many other people, they look like relatives behind bars.

Biomedical research on chimps helped produce a vaccine for hepatitis B, and is aimed at one for hepatitis C, which infects 170 million people worldwide, but there has long been an outcry against the research as cruel and unnecessary. Now, because of a major push by advocacy organizations, a decision to stop such research in the United States could come within a year. As it is,

Most conservationists would agree that you should not interfere with mother nature. But there are exceptions to every rule.

Staff and tourists at Kapani Safari Lodge in Zambia were caught by surprise when a mother and baby elephant became trapped in mud.

Together with the South Luangwa Conservation Society (SLCS) and the local wildlife authority, the team devised a plan to get the elephants out. The rest of the herd initially tried to help the screaming mother and baby escape, but they were stuck too deep.

Lax anti-poaching efforts are to blame for the loss of the last wild specimens of Western Black Rhino, leading the rhinoceros subspecies to be declared officially extinct this week, conservationists said Friday.

Prized by poachers for their horns, which are used as trophies and in traditional medicine, the Western Black Rhino now exists only in zoos.

"There were very limited anti-poaching efforts in place to save the animals, and anyone caught poaching was not sentenced, hence no deterrents were in place," said Craig Hilton-Taylor of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

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The Javan rhinoceros is extinct in mainland Asia, conservationists announced this week.

An adult female Javan rhino was shot and killed in a Vietnamese forest last year—leaving just one wild population left of the species in the world, a group of fewer than 50 individuals in a small park in Indonesia.

Conservationists are sure that no more Javan rhinos exist in Vietnam.

The animal's local extinction should be a wakeup call to Vietnam to protect its other endangered animals, such as tigers and elephants, he added.

"It's a question of mourning the loss but making sure we

Up to 73 million sharks are caught each year for the global fin trade, which fuels a demand for shark-fin soup, according to Pew. Fishers usually slice the animals' fins off and throw their still-living bodies overboard.

"Unfortunately, since there are no limits on the number of these animals that can be killed in the open ocean, this activity can continue unabated," Pew's Matt Rand said in a statement. "This strip-mining of the world's sharks is clearly unsustainable."

Overall, "sharks play a critical role in the ocean environment," Pew's Jill Hepp said in a statement.

"Where shark populations are healthy, marine life thrives; but where they have been overfished, ecosystems fall out of balance," Hepp said.

Thirty percent of all shark species are now threatened or near threatened with extinction, due largely to unregulated fishing, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

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The City of Toronto has recently banned the sale and possession of shark fins and any derivative products. Read more below.

With orangutan numbers in Indonesia having plunged 80 percent in 40 years, the only way to reverse this trend is to push for greater conservation awareness in society and especially in the education system, leading primatologist and conservationist Dr. Biruté Galdikas said in an interview.

“We absolutely need to get the conservation curriculum into local schools and villages – not just for children, but all levels of society. Television programs, newspaper articles and magazine articles…education at all levels: we need to do more,” she said.

As orangutans’ forest homes are destroyed and they are forced to live in isolated pockets, they are brought into far more frequent contact with humans, and are hunted for food and the pet trade.

Though the hunting of endangered apes for bush meat occurs largely in Africa, the problem is an international one because what used to be subsistence hunting has now become an international, multi-million dollar industry.

The meat of these endangered animals does not feed starving people. It is bought and sold at incredibly high prices as a luxury item by urban Africa, as well as transported internationally and sold on black markets. In some cities, a small piece of chimpanzee meat can fetch the same price as an entire cow.

In 2009 I went to Uganda to document the efforts of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Budongo

Posing as black market gorilla buyers, the rangers recovered the infant male unharmed inside a backpack and arrested three poachers, who were seeking to sell the gorilla—now named Shamavu after his rescuer-for as much as U.S. $40,000, according to park authorities.

Shamavu is the fourth baby gorilla Virunga rangers have recovered from poachers in 2011—the highest number on record in a single year, suggesting that baby-gorilla trafficking may be on the rise in the region.

"We are very concerned about a growing market for baby gorillas that is feeding a dangerous trafficking activity in rebel-controlled areas of eastern DRC," Virunga National Park Warden Emmanuel de Merode said in a statement.

"We are powerless to control the international trade in baby gorillas, but our rangers are doing everything they can to stamp it out on the ground."

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Blobs of slimy jellyfish are taking over some beaches in the southern United States, the result of a shrinking fish population caused by humans, scientists claim.

“Now that fish are being overfished in a lot of ecosystems, it's providing an opportunity for jellyfish populations to explode,” said Sean Colin, an associate professor of marine biology at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

“There's been evidence suggesting that there are more and more jellyfish blooms globally.”

When there are fewer fish, the jellyfish are able to ingest more food as there is less competition for it.

Scientists have discovered that a species of zooplankton will eat a fungal pathogen that is killing amphibians around the world. 

Researchers at Oregon State University found that Daphnia magna, a freshwater microorganism, will consume the zoopore or the free-swimming stage of the "chytrid" fungus. The discovery opens the door for a possible biological solution to a problem that has confounded ecologists. 

"We feel that biological control offers the best chance to control this fungal disease, and now we have a good candidate for that," said Julia Buck, a doctoral student in zoology at

Worldwide wolf populations have dropped around 99 percent from historic populations. Lion populations have fallen from 450,000 to 20,000 in 50 years. Three subspecies of tiger went extinct in the 20th Century. Overfishing and finning has cut some shark populations down by 90 percent in just a few decades. Though humpback whales have rebounded since whaling was banned, they are still far from historic numbers. While some humans have mourned such statistics as an aesthetic loss, scientists now say these declines have a far greater impact on humans than just the vanishing of iconic animals. 

The almost wholesale destruction of top predators—such as sharks, wolves, and big cats—has drastically altered the world's

    Photo by Rhett A. Butler

Sharks are amazing. When you bother to stop and really look at them, they're just flat out amazing creatures. Scientists, thankfully, are studying them ever more closely and are finding many ways in which these prehistoric fish can inspire futuristic technologies, from their skin to the way they feed.

Click here to learn about four ways that the extraordinary biology of sharks is helping engineers solve some pretty remarkable problems!

Photo from Jaymi Heimbuch (to the right)

Orcas are a particularly fascinating animal to study because of their social complexities. They live with their mother and her family their whole lives and each family has their own “dialect” of calls. Scientists have made the case in peer-reviewed journals for the existence of culture in some cetaceans including orcas.

Groups of orcas can share the same habitat but not interact with each other at all; the salmon-eating resident pods don’t intermingle with the so-called “transient” orcas that prey on marine mammals, yet they are regularly found traversing the same waters within days or even hours of each other. As far as

Threatened by a volcano and bush-meat hunters, the Siau Island tarsier is among animal species newly designated critically endangered in the 2011 update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Red List of Threatened Species, released last week.

The world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species, the Red List classifies species into eight categories, ranging from "not evaluated" to "extinct." A critically endangered species is defined as a species at extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.

The Siau Island tarsier, for example, inhabits only one small Indonesian island dominated by an active volcano.

"Depending on the magnitude of the eruption and the path of the lava flows, the population could be severely affected or even possibly disappear," said Rebecca Miller, program officer for the U.K.-based Red List Unit.

The big-eyed primates also face immediate pressure from islanders

Photograph courtesy Geoff Deehan

Almost 40 years ago, the last wild Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx), a large, cream-colored antelope with striking black horns, met its end in the deserts of Oman—shot by a hunter. But this week, conservationists announced that the oryx, which may have led to the legend of the unicorn, has been successfully restored to its native habitat on the Arabian Peninsula. It's the first time scientists have achieved such a remarkable turn-around for a species once declared extinct in the wild. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has moved the oryx from "endangered" to "vulnerable" on the organization's latest red list of threatened species.

There are five species of rhinoceros in the world: two in Africa and three in Asia. Two of the three Asian populations — the Sumatran and Javan varieties — are on the brink of extinction. The story in southern Africa is more heartening. Back in the 1960s, the African black rhino numbered about 100,000, but its population waned to just 2,400 in the early 1990s. Today its numbers have doubled to about 4,800 — still low, but heading in the right direction. The real conservation success story has been the dramatic rebound of the African white rhino. A century ago, there were as few as 50 of the beasts alive. Now, because of field-conservation efforts, relocation of animals to safer regions and expanded wildlife refuges, the population has reached around 20,000.

A DIVER carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins.

Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between "bring the surfboard to the man" and "bring the man to the surfboard", for example.

In an abbreviated, terse press conference on Wednesday United States Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will propose removing gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the endangered species list in the northern Rockies and the western Great Lakes. 

Last month, lawmakers in Congress made additions to their annual budget to remove wolves in the Rockies from the Endangered Species Act, completely ignoring scientific evidence and advice in the process. The action by Congress and the proposal from Salazar is an attempt to completely nullify federal court rulings granting greater levels of protections to the wolves. 

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Pekanbaru, Indonesia – WWF camera traps recorded an astounding 12 tigers in just two months in the central Sumatran landscape of Bukit Tigapuluh, including two mothers with cubs. A video camera trap in the same area has also captured footage of three young tiger siblings playfully chasing a leaf. 

This remarkable footage is connected to much more acquired by WWF Researchers on the ground in Indonesia. This is startling as this stretch of forest is flagged to be removed as part of local pulp and paper harvesting in the area. This is an area that experiences the removal of more than 200,000 hectares of forest in six years. A staggering amount.

This, however, provides some hope. If these cats can survive in the remaining forests, we can feel confident that if habitat is protected, survival is possible. This leaves one very important thing for us to do. Protect these forests.

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Video produced by WWF International

A stalk of the newfound fungus species Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani, grows out of a "zombie" ant's head in a Brazilian rain forest.

Originally thought to be a single species, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus is actually four distinct species—all of which can "mind control" ants—scientists announced Wednesday.

The fungus species can infect an ant, take over its brain, and then kill the insect once it moves to a location ideal for the fungi to grow and spread their spores.

All four known fungi species live in Brazil's Atlantic rain forest, which is rapidly changing due to climate change and deforestation, said study leader David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University.

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Photograph by David Hughes

Talk about "eew" de toilette—male monkeys that wash with their own urine may be putting out an irresistible scent to females, a new study suggests.

Males and females of several monkey species pee into their hands and then vigorously rub the fluid into their fur. Scientists have posed various theories to explain the behavior, which range from regulating body temperature to communicating aggression.

Now, brain images of female capuchin monkeys have revealed that male urine sends sexual signals, according to study leader Kimberley A. Phillips, a psychologist at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

"Apparently, a male covered in urine is quite attractive," Phillips said.

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Photograph by Brad Wilson, Stone/Getty Images

It will come as no surprise to dog owners that their four-legged friends have a flair for sniffing out the excrement of other animals. Now, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, have trained dogs to detect the scat of other critters for the greater good -- to conduct more accurate surveys of wildlife.

"Wildlife detection dogs have been mostly used in airports to detect contraband, including endangered species and wildlife products, but in recent years, interest has grown in using the dogs to help scientists track biological targets in natural settings," said Sarah Reed, lead author of a paper documenting the dogs' performance that is published in the January issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management. "Working with dogs can greatly improve our ability to detect rare species and help us to understand how these species are responding to large-scale environmental changes, such as habitat loss and fragmentation."

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According to the first study of its kind in Africa, bushmeat hunting impacts African rainforests by wiping-out large mammals and birds—such as forest elephants, primates, and hornbills—that are critical for dispersing certain tree species. The study, published in Biotropica, found that heavy bushmeat hunting in the Central African Republic changes the structure of forest species by favoring small-seeded trees over large-seeded, leading to lower tree diversity of trees that have big seeds.

"When hunters remove big animals, they remove at the same time the ecological functions of the animals," lead author Hadrien Vanthomme, from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in France, explained to mongabay.com. "To keep it simple, animals can have two opposite impacts on forest regeneration: they can favor it (mostly by carrying seeds away from the parent plants, phenomenon called dispersal), or they can oppose regeneration (by destroying seeds or young seedlings). So basically, we expect that if a guild of animals implied in seed dispersal of a plant is removed, the regeneration of this plant species will be compromised."

Most people wish each day had more than 24 hours. But as the planet heats up, that limited number of hours might push endangered African apes even closer to extinction by making their current habitats unsuitable for their lifestyle, according to a controversial study published on 23 July in the Journal of Biogeography.

Researchers from the United Kingdom modeled how the most dire forecasts of climate change would affect the African habitats of gorillas and chimpanzees. They didn’t include the impacts of human encroachment or the burgeoning bushmeat market. But they did add a novel component: the ecology of the animals themselves. The scientists considered ape behaviors and body mass, as well as group size, a critical part of life for social animals.

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It may seem like birds have the freedom to fly wherever they like, but researchers at the University of Missouri have shown that what's on the ground has a great effect on where a bird flies. This information could be used by foresters and urban planners to improve bird habitats that would help maintain strong bird populations.

"Movement of individuals influences nearly every aspect of biology, from the existence of a single population to interactions within and among species," said Dylan Kesler, assistant professor in fisheries and wildlife at the University of Missouri's School of Natural Resources. "Movement determines where individual birds procreate. How they spread across the landscape affects who meets whom, which in turn dictates how genes are spread."

Kesler has found that non-migrating resident birds tend to travel over forest "corridors," which are areas protected by trees and used by wildlife to travel. Birds choose to travel over forests because they can make an easier escape from predators as well as find food. Man-made features such as roads, as well as gaps forests from agriculture or rivers, can restrict birds to certain areas. When forests are removed, bird populations become isolated and disconnected, which can lead to inbreeding and weaker, more disease-prone birds.  

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They don't make penguins like they used to. Thirty-six million years ago, at least one species stood nearly as tall as a man and sported shades of red and gray, scientists announced Thursday.

The new species, called the water king, sheds light on bird evolution, researchers say. For starters, penguins' apparently recent switch to black-and-white may have been more about swimming than, say, sex or camouflage.

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Over thousands of millennia a mantle of sediment built up over its bones. The sea receded, and as the former seabed became a desert, the wind began to plane away the sandstone and shale above the bones.

Slowly the world changed. Shifts in the Earth's crust pushed India into Asia, heaving up the Himalaya. In Africa, the first human ancestors stood up on their hind legs to walk. The pharaohs built their pyramids. Rome rose, Rome fell. And all the while the wind continued its patient excavation. Then one day Philip Gingerich showed up to finish the job.

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An unidentified purple octopus (pictured) is one of 11 potentially new species found this month during a deep-sea expedition off Canada's Atlantic coast, scientists say.

Still at sea, a team of Canadian and Spanish researchers is using a remotely operated vehicle called ROPOS for dives off Newfoundland with a maximum depth of about 9,800 feet (3,000 meters).

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Chimpanzees may comfort others in distress in ways very similar to how people do, according to what may be the largest study of consolation in animals by far. The new findings in our closest living relatives could help shed light on the roots of empathy in humans.

The spontaneous consolation of someone in distress with a hug, a pat on the back or other friendly display of physical contact has been studied in human children as a sign of sympathetic concern for others for decades. This kind of demonstrative empathy is often thought to be a large part of what sets humanity apart from other animals.

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Lounging in the shade may sound soothing, but it could be the death of many lizards if global warming continues at current rates.

As temperatures inch upward, the reptiles rest more and hunt less. As a result, 20 percent of lizard species could go extinct by 2080, a new study says.

No matter what we do to fight global warming, at least 6 percent of lizard species will go extinct by then, due to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, the study says.

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"We have found that the hatching of the eggs, which ended last week, have gone down by 40 to 50 per cent this year as the eggs, numbering thousands, got spoiled after the leaked oil soaked the nesting site on the beach," Rabindranath Sahu, secretary of the Rushikulya Sea Turtle Protection Committee, told reporters.

An oil coat had spread over a seven km area near the nesting site off the Rushikulya beach after around eight tonnes of furnace oil leaked from an Essar-owned vessel near Gopalpur port, 20 km from here, on April 12.

Being pushed by high tide, the spilled oil spread to the coast. Villagers claimed that they had seen carcasses of adult turtles along the coast after the sea water had been contaminated. Around 1,55,000 of the rare Olive Ridleys had nested along the coastline in March while the mass hatching of eggs, which continued for a week, ended last week. 

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A huge oil spill oozing toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday threatens hundreds of species of wildlife, some in their prime breeding season, environmental organizations said.

The Coast Guard said Wednesday that the amount of oil spilling from an underwater well after an oil rig explosion last week has increased to as many as 5,000 barrels of oil a day, or 210,000 gallons, five times more than what was originally believed.

Wildlife experts on Wednesday were beaming over new photos of a rare Sumatran rhinoceros, thought to be pregnant, in Malaysian Borneo, saying a new calf would be a lifeline for the near-extinct species. 

Only 30 rhinos are thought to remain in the wild on Borneo island, and researchers are only able to monitor the reclusive animals through images captured on remote camera traps. 

The news comes after Ratu, a young female Sumatran rhino at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park, had a miscarriage last month, seen as a major blow to efforts to pull the species back from the brink. 

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Their underbellies resemble a brightly coloured masterpiece by Michelangelo (or maybe Leonardo or Raphael). But Greater Victoria’s native turtle population is being threatened by one of man’s newer creations.

Earlier this month, five baby Western painted turtles – a species deemed endangered on Vancouver Island – became roadkill on Beaver Lake Road.

“The problem is, we don’t expect drivers to see the babies. They’re about the size of a loonie ... But we hope people will slow down enough to see the adults,” said Todd Carnahan, land care co-ordinator with Habitat Acquisition Trust.

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Songbirds in the US are getting smaller, and climate change is suspected as the cause.

A study of almost half a million birds, belonging to over 100 species, shows that many are gradually becoming lighter and growing shorter wings.

This shrinkage has occurred within just half a century, with the birds thought to be evolving into a smaller size in response to warmer temperatures.

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Bear cubs in the South Chilcotins, British Columbia          (Credit: Pat Mulrooney)

After the massive international spotlight on Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics, many people will remember Canada for the accomplishments of our winter athletes. Those who came to Vancouver for the Games will remember our friendliness and our ability to create a society where people from many backgrounds and cultures can live together. But just as many will remember us for something that has always defined our nation: our spectacular natural environment.

The forests, mountains, rivers, and ocean are visible no matter where you go in Vancouver. The wilderness at our doorstep is home to a wide range of plants and animals, especially for a northern temperate region. In much of Canada, you can still find all of the charismatic megafauna that were present at the time of European settlement, including grizzly bears, cougars, wolves, and wolverines.

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You scratch my back I'll scratch yours?

A warthog has been pictured being groomed by a huge bird known as a ground hornbill.

The warthog approached the southern ground hornbill seeking the favour, and the bird obliged by removing parasites from the warthog's body.

Similar interactions occur between warthogs and other animals such as banded mongooses.

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The recent attack by a captive orca on its trainer at a SeaWorld facility in Orlando, Florida, has again raised questions about our relationship with these top marine predators.

No-one knows what triggered the latest incident, and experts agree that it is almost impossible to determine why the orca, called Tilikum, reacted as it did.

But it does highlight the tensions that occur when we choose to interact closely with these huge animals.

It is also debatable what to do with those orcas, also known as killer whales, that remain in captivity.

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One person.

In a world of seemingly overwhelming and unstoppable issues, it takes just one person to stand up and make their voice heard to change the course of history and create a better world for all life.

And it will take the signature of just one person – a young First Nation student from Klemtu, a farmer from the Peace River, a hunter from the Kootenays, a lawyer from downtown Vancouver, a member of the British Columbian government – to stop the trophy hunting of the Great Bear’s Great Bears.

Officials from 13 nations are meeting to discuss conservation efforts to save the endangered tiger. Officials from countries where tigers still roam - Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam - are taking part in the Asia Ministerial Conference (AMC) on Tiger Conservation. The conference runs from January 27 to January 30, 2010, in Thailand.

The World Bank and Global Tiger Initiative are urging the closing of tiger farms. Tiger farms, located primarily in China, also exist in other parts of the world. Despite a 1993 ban on the domestic tiger trade in China, the demand for tiger parts is still high and tiger farms continue to thrive. The domestic tiger trade harvests skin, bones, organs and other body parts often used in traditional medicines or as aphrodisiacs. 

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The number of monarch butterflies in the Mexican colonies where the colourful orange and black migratory insects spend their winters has declined to the lowest on record.

The colony size totals only 1.92 hectares this winter, the equivalent of about 2½ soccer fields, compared with the previous low in 2004 of 2.19 hectares, according to the latest Mexican census.

Although the slippage between the two years is slight and is being attributed mainly to weather-related factors